10/03/2002 Entry:
"The Dark Wind - Errol Morris (1991)"

Being a bit of an Errol Morris nut, I could not let life pass me by without seeing his only fiction film The Dark Wind. Never released theatrically in the US, it lives on only through out of print VHS. I managed to snag my copy used on Amazon, and they show up on Ebay/Half.com as well. I should point out that should you be inspired to go to such lengths yourself, the tape is of fairly poor quality. It is pan and scan, and towards the end the frame is cropped improperly, causing this floating black bar to appear and occasionally letting a microphone slip into frame.

In an interview in The Onion from 1997 Morris had this to say about The Dark Wind:

O: The Dark Wind wasn't particularly well-received. What was your reaction to that?

EM: It certainly wasn't surprise. It wasn't very well-received by me either. I wasn't really allowed to direct or edit it. I used to call myself the first below-the-line director. It's a very weird experience to work on a movie where you have no control, really, over the outcome. That was a singular experience in my work as a filmmaker, and something that I would really never like to repeat.

Indeed Morris seems to have completely disowned the film, he doesn't even list it in his filmography on ErrolMorris.com. To put it into the context of his body of work, it comes between The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History Of Time.

I will just start out by saying that this movie is really not very good. It is impossible to say how good it would be if Morris had been given more control over the outcome, however the script is quite bad and the performance of Lou Diamond Phillips is adequate at best. Seeing as how I doubt that anyone reading this has actually seen the film, I'll go into a little bit more detail than usual. The story is based on the novel by Tony Hillerman, and it sets Lou Diamond Phillips as a Navajo sherrif in Arizona where he is forced to deal with tribal politics, witchcraft, moonshiners, and a crashed plane filled with cocaine. This makes it sound pretty exciting, but its all put forth at a very languid pace as Phillips wanders from place to place, conducting interviews and putting the pieces together. In a way, the film reminded me of Lone Star in that there are several groups whose interests all collide in a variety of ways, with a conclusion that pits the past against the present and ties everything together.

The biggest problem with the film by far is the voiceover narration. Not only does it function to "explain" everything, which I hate, but the language is forced and overdramatic. Narration rarely works, and this is no exception. Its not helped by the delivery of Phillips, who is pretty hard to believe as a native Navajo. I have to give him some credit though, according to an imdb user comment he is actually speaking proper Navajo in a couple scenes where he converses with native Indians. I didn't buy his whole character though. A a matter of fact, none of the performanes are worth writing home about, barring Gary Farmer who is enjoyable in his role as a Hopi deputy (he also played the role of Nobody in the Jim Jarmusch films Dead Man and Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai.)

Really the only redeeming part of this movie is the beautiful cinematography by Morris and his DP Stefan Czapsky, who ended up working with Morris again on A Brief History Of Time. The whole film was shot on location in Arizona, and it is filmed with the kind of bright blown out colors you would expect from summer desert days. Interiors are typically shot with a wide angle and few cuts, the long takes tending to contribute to a sort of slow thoughtful pacing which matches the lifestyle of the people being photographed. One scene near the end that almost makes it worth sitting through the whole film. Three characters are involved in a fight during a lightning storm. A camera on a crane begins from a distance away, and as the characters struggle, it begins pulling in and then floats around them to catch a different angle as it pulls in closer. The whole sequence probably only takes about a minute and a half, all one shot with no cuts, and it is completely the opposite of what you expect out of a fight sequence. Full of atmosphere and class, it gives a tantalizing hint of what could have been if Morris had been given the opportunity to make the film under his own rules. Its too bad that I will probably never be able to see the film on a big screen as it was meant to be seen, because I'm sure the widescreen images would be wonderful to look at.

Morris is often asked about making another fiction film in interviews, and he always kind of dances around the issue, saying he would like to make another one but he never seems to get around to it. He has finished two seasons of his fantastic cable television series First Person, and is currently working on another feature-length documentary about Robert McNamara, former secretary of defense and current president of the World Bank. So I guess its not something we'll get a chance to see anytime soon. Hopefully someday though, he will get his chance. Aside from anything else, it would be nice to see him get a chance at a little wider distribution than documentaries traditionlly can (although for a documentary filmmaker, he's probably already more widely distributed than anyone else.)